


no matter how many skies have fallen

by Spylace



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 19:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1163691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel has always watched over Dean</p>
            </blockquote>





	no matter how many skies have fallen

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from livejournal
> 
> Wow, season 6 was a long time ago

Castiel’s body disintegrates when he touches the atmosphere, his flesh stripped from cartilage and bone as his grace unfurls into the shape of a newborn star. Immediately, he becomes aware, even welcomed, of the brethren who had seen his trials on the abandoned planet. They grip him tight as though afraid to let him fall, relieved to avoid another war, relived to preserve their father’s masterpiece.   
  
But there are those who shun him, their feathers like knives and sharpened to a point when he approaches. He bats these away, weary and spent as he watches them reform under Raphael’s thunderous wings. The archangel is belligerent and angry, thwarted and lost. God is gone and so is Michael; as he had predicted, heaven erupts into utter chaos.  
  
And when his brothers begin killing each other, he can’t help but look away.  
  
Castiel is an angel, a warrior. But he has learned what it is like to be human in the last year, his powers sapped, no stronger than that of a grigori, doomed to watch over the sons and daughters of men. It means little to him if his grace has been restored two-fold, it will only expedite the destruction of their race, and he lets his resentment be felt towards an absent father who is no longer there.   
  
He stares at Earth, a planet in a universe filled with thousands of others and wonders what his father had seen in its blue-green depths. He caresses it with his nonexistent fingers and smoke-colored wings, breathing his hopes and dreams, unbefitting of an angel of the lord, into the atmosphere where he had been laid bare and at Dean, whom he can feel, still tenuously connected through their bond.   
  
With a touch of his palms he had carved the Enochian symbols in to their ribs but Dean, Dean he had made with his own hands, atom by atom, using his will and grace to knit the body back together with its broken soul. It mattered little if Dean was imperceptible to the heavenly host, he would have recognized the man anywhere, known the lilt of his voice and the smell of his skin, the golden brown hair and the green of his eyes.  
  
The first time he visits, he hovers over the house and its occupants, his brothers’ whispers bidding him home. But he ignores these and instead sinks into the roofing and the tiles, the half-clogged drains and the pipes and a copse of thistles and yellow buttercups. To these he leaves his blessings, a protection like a permanent line of salt. He stands outside on the grass, except not because he does not have legs to stand on. But he stares through the flimsy walls and the cream wall paper, through the boy and his growing frame, through the woman and her black curls.   
  
He finds Dean in the guest room, clutching a thin quilt over his head, faithfully carrying out his younger brother’s dying wish to see him happy—and safe. It is with a bitter taste of irony that it is Sam who has tamed Dean at last, like a falcon hooded and bound by leather jesses. Dean’s brow is creased in fear and panic, a hand fisting the soaked pillow case as he twists and turns himself into a knot. Castiel reaches out and brushes his primaries against a hand print he can no longer match, the patch of raised skin singing as though it’s been wiped with alcohol.   
  
“You still dream of hell.” Castiel says in wonder, his presence both outside and in. Dean shifts at the angel’s voice, no longer afflicted but rather soothed by its subsonic tone. “You are looking for your brother.” The man lets out a small whimper and holds his breath, the edge of his lips tinged grey and blue before he lets it out with an explosive gasp. Castiel eases him out his dreams, unable to watch. He disappears just as Dean wakes up.  
  
He tells himself that it will be the last time, and the next, then the next. Words come unbidden but not words; sentiments and feelings too foreign to be shared, too precious not to be given. He finds himself telling the unconscious hunter anything and everything he has ever known. Sometimes, Dean is a quiet listener, content to lie on the bed, on the couch, in the backset of the impala. Other times, he tosses and turns, troubled, so Castiel restricts himself to soothing tales of what heaven was like before Lucifer’s rebellion, before their father went away, before the archangels ceased to care.  
  
“Strange,” he adds, “how we look towards the past though we are to seek tomorrow.”  
  
Dean huffs and Castiel spreads his wings.  
  
“You are safe here; they will not be able to find you.”  
  
“...Sammy...”  
  
And Dean is speaking to the empty air.  
  
“Ramiel was hurt but there were no casualties.”  
  
“What is the purpose of air quotes?”  
  
“What would you have done?”  
  
“My brothers... they do not understand. None of them understand.”  
  
The next time Castiel visits, he is wounded, the gaps in his wings caulked with his grace. He has no idea how much time has passed since he last came. Dean lays entwined with the woman, Lisa, but he pays this no mind as he settles over the floor on his side.   
  
“My apologies” he croaks, as though they can hear. “I’m afraid today was not a very good day.”  
  
Dean breathes deep as though disagreeing. He unglues himself from Lisa’s back and turns over, slipping one arm beneath the pillow for a gun that is no longer there and the other hangs over the edge of the bed, a bait, an offering, a temptation. Castiel would have cocked his head had he been able, studying the clean line of Dean’s forearm and the scattering of fine hairs. He touches the fragile pulse point where the wrist meets the base of his hand. Dean does not stir. “Dean... Sam is alive.”   
  
It is inevitable. Sam Winchester returns to claim his brother, tears him away from the circle of Castiel’s protection and sets out on a hunt; Dean a hound of god, his brother’s keeper, a hunter, a father, a friend, a falcon with jesses with a hood over his head. Raw agony ripples through him as he watches the events unfold though Raphael sneers with vindictive pleasure, suggesting a lie to a secret he cannot even begin to guess at.   
  
On the last night Dean spends with Lisa, Castiel comes to him with his vessel restored and in sorrow, head bowed and his face haggard. “If you return I cannot stop what is about to happen.” Stay, he wants to tell him but he can’t for he is still an angel of the Lord and Dean the righteous man. And to tell him the truth, that he is merely an instrument to end all of creation and time, would have been an abomination.   
  
When he is called to Dean’s side, Sam bristling in indignance at being ignored, he lies—“I didn’t come because of you.”


End file.
